Todd Shea at Yasodera, a home for orphaned girls in Sri Lanka, where he spent a month volunteering after the Dec. 2004 Asian tsunami.

Three weeks after the Oct. 8, 2005 earthquake, Todd Shea (right) helps a mother who needed formula for her baby in the village of Ghari Dupatta. After weeks of treating children injured by the quake, this was the first uninjured child that relief workers met. They called her the "the miracle baby."

Todd Shea digging a foundation in February, 2005 to help rebuild a home in Sri Lanka for victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami. The home he rebuilt was for a family that had lost their father, a van driver, who was swept away by the tsunami and drowned.

Todd Shea organizing medical supplies in the village of Ghari Dupatta. He landed in Pakistan, eight days after the Oct. 8, 2005 earthquake. When he arrived at the base camp for the disaster relief workers, Shea worked for 48 hours organizing piles of medical supplies so that doctors and nurses could easily access what they needed.

Todd Shea, right, and his son Tim play guitars in Pakistan. "Being able to help people by making them smile, being able to raise money by playing in front of them, that's one level," says Todd Shea. "But there is a whole deeper level when you're there in their environment in a disaster situation...And you're literally hands-on getting your hands dirty, helping them in direct ways that change their lives for the better."

Guitarist Todd Shea is working on a music project with Pakistani and American musicians that will be "a cultural bridge of peace" he says and will raise money for the relief efforts of Comprehensive Disaster Response Services in Pakistan.

Todd Shea with then-President Pervez Musharraf at the president's house in Islamabad, Pakistan on June 30 2006. Shea received the medal of sacrifice, one of the highest civilian honors in Pakistan.

Todd Shea with then-President Pervez Musharraf receiving Pakistan's medal of sacrifice for his earthquake relief work. "The children there took my heart from the moment that I was there because in no disaster that I went to did I ever see so many thousands of children who had survived with horrific injuries," said Shea.

The patient ward at the Chikar Rural Health Center, where Todd Shea's Comprehensive Disaster Response Services is headquartered in the village of Chikar.

Todd Shea's son Tim, a student at St. Mary's College in Maryland, carrying school supplies for school children in Pakistan." I should be willing to set my guitar down and set my comfortable life down and do what I teach my son, which is to care about people on the other side of the world," says Todd Shea. "And not just tell him that, show him that."

Thousands of miles from Orange County, in a Pakistani village so remote, so high in the mountains of Kashmir that mountains mingle with clouds, Todd Shea came to a halt.

“Maybe this is all I can do,” Shea thought last year. It wasn’t the first time the prospect had crossed the Maryland native’s mind.

Shea, executive director of Comprehensive Disaster Response Services — a relief organization he created to help the victims of the Oct. 8, 2005 Pakistan earthquake – had run out of money. He hadn’t paid his medical staff in four months. And he was close to running out of medications.

“We’ve been within days of being out of money, many, many times. Every time something has come through, somebody helped. So I just believed that somebody would drop out of the sky I guess,” he says.

“And somebody did.”

That somebody – or rather, those somebodies – is a group of Orange County Pakistani-Americans who, through endless rounds of fundraisers, volunteer missions to Kashmir and public awareness campaigns, have provided a big chunk of the money used by Shea’s group. The effort has meant some access medical care for people still recovering, three years after the quake, in a part of the world that spends less than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on health and education.

On Tuesday, I introduced you to social worker Laila Karamally of Irvine. She met Shea on the second of two postquake volunteer missions to the region and has been organizing fundraisers ever since. She’s been helped by, among others, Newport Beach pulmonologist Salman Naqvi, Irvine internist Adeela Ahsan, and Irvine physician Nazli Ahmed.

The loyalty of this group, Shea says, “has really been why we survived.”

Shortly after the earthquake hit, Ahsan spent about a week in the Kashmir region as a volunteer doctor working alongside Shea. Ahsan saw 200 patients a day in conditions she described as chaotic, as well as physically and emotionally taxing.

“When all the (non-government organizations) wrapped up, and everybody left, Todd stayed behind. For me that’s a humanitarian in the truest sense of the word,” says Ahsan, a native of Karachi.

“He had no ethnic, no religious, no linguistic, no blood ties with the people of Kashmir. And that doesn’t matter, that’s a non issue. The most important thing is these people need help, they deserve health care, and he’s the only one who kept his commitment to the people.”

Shea, a musician, might seem like the unlikeliest of candidates to have taken on this enormous task. But the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City changed the course of his life.

Shea was living on Long Island at the time while recording a music project, but had spent the night in a Queens hotel for a Sept. 12 performance. As he watched the images of the Twin Towers burning, he felt compelled to get to Ground Zero to help.

He emptied his music equipment from his van and began ferrying firefighters, their families and counselors, to hospitals. In all he spent a week, delivering fruit, Gatorade and water to fire engine companies at Ground Zero. He even set up a makeshift pharmacy on a street corner to provide energy bars, contact lens eyewash and ice and dust masks to rescue teams.

“I don’t know how to go into a burning building. I don’t know how to save somebody’s life. I don’t even have any business treating a hang nail. But what I can do is make sure there are enough supplies and medicine,” says Shea, a guitarist whose mother gave him a guitar as a Christmas gift when he was 12, shortly before she died of a Valium overdose.

Losing a parent at such a young age, he says, helped him develop compassion and empathy for others, but he believes it was the example his mother set, often giving up her last dime for someone in need, that now guides him as an adult.

He had often used his music to address issues of social injustice. But after Sept. 11, he realized that the logistical skills he learned while managing his rock bands could be put to good use doing humanitarian work.

So after the 2004 Asian tsunami, he spent a month in Sri Lanka rebuilding homes and volunteering in a clinic and orphanages. When Hurricane Katrina hit, he coordinated the delivery of high-tech rubber rafts for the 82nd Airborne division of the U.S. Army. In that effort, he earned a commendation from the Louisiana Department of Animal Control for rescuing hundreds of abandoned pets and delivering rabies vaccine.

Shea had just returned home from New Orleans, when he saw news of the earthquake in Pakistan and told his son Tim he wanted to go there. “But you just came back,” Tim responded.

“No. I’ve got to go,” said Shea.

Some Americans have criticized Shea saying he’s helping the enemy and helping children who will one day come to America and “blow us up.” He responds that America has a responsibility to help Pakistan, given what he sees as foreign policy mistakes in the region.

“A lot of people realize now that we failed in Afghanistan to help rebuild that country after the Soviets (left)…But they don’t realize how many Afghan refugees came across the border and still live in Pakistan, and became a drain on an already poor nation,” Shea says.

U.S. government policies that provide Pakistan aid and development in the areas of education and health would lessen the fuel that fires terrorism, he adds.

“These policies would help decrease hopelessness and despair. They would give people hope. I think that the best of America is when we go out into the world and use our good fortune and compassion to help people who are in bad shape.”

In December, Shea launched a self-sustainable health care model in Pakistan that offers villagers in the Kashmir region medical and health care for an affordable fee. He is in Orange County this week, working with Karamally to incorporate Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering (SHINE), which will serve as an umbrella organization for his project in Pakistan. It’s a health care model he hopes to replicate in other countries.

“Since 9-11 happened I learned that I can do this,” says Shea. “If I hadn’t responded to the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina or the Pakistan earthquake, I don’t know if I would have forgiven myself, because I knew that I could help.”

Contact the writer: For information go to: www.cdrspakistan.org. Contact the writer at ycabrera@ocregister.com or 714-796-3649.

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